A Comparative Study of Functional Words in the English and Uzbek Languages

Abstract

. This article explores the comparative features of functional words in the English and Uzbek languages through an expanded, human-focused perspective. Functional words, although seemingly small and often overlooked, play a decisive role in meaning-making, syntactic organization, and the expression of relationships within a text. The study analyzes articles, prepositions, conjunctions, particles, auxiliaries and modal verbs within both linguistic systems, highlighting similarities, divergences, and unique structural phenomena. The methodology includes descriptive analysis, contrastive comparison, and contextual interpretation of usage across written and spoken discourse. The findings show that English exhibits a more analytically oriented and category-rich system of functional words due to its syntactic dependence on them, while Uzbek relies more heavily on agglutinative morphology, using affixes instead of many standalone function words. This contrast underlines different cognitive patterns of encoding meaning. The discussion emphasizes the pedagogical importance of teaching functional words for translators, language learners, and linguists.